Starlinger intern, 2024/01 - Issue 36

FRANZ HÖPFLINGER

A RETIREMENT FAREWELL

KONSTANTIN HINTERPLATTNER

A total of 48 years in plastics machinery manufacturing, including almost 19 years at Starlinger Taicang, which followed periods at Lenzing AG and later at SML – it’s been a remarkable career! In May 2024, Franz Höpflinger, the long-standing head of our Chinese subsidiary in Taicang, which he successfully built up into what it is today, went into well-deserved retirement. “I arrived in Taicang on 17 October 2005 with my wife and my then one-year-old daughter with the job of setting up a production site for Starlinger,” Höpflinger recalls. “It was far from easy to find your way around a foreign country and culture. Setting up our production facility here was a major challenge: The Chinese way of approaching projects is different to that of European companies, and I first had to learn to deal with that. However, it has now become a challenge for me to get to grips with the European way of doing things,” he smiles. Franz Höpflinger started his career in 1985 at Lenzing AG in the Plastics Machinery division. Since the demerger and takeover by Starlinger in 1995, this division has been trading as SML Maschinengesellschaft m.b.H.. Franz Höpflinger also made the change and worked at SML for the following 10 years. In 2005, he accepted Starlinger’s offer to go to China and help establish the production site in Taicang. “I saw it as my task to safeguard jobs in Austria by establishing the Taicang site,” says Höpflinger. “I think I’ve managed that very well.” We would like to thank Franz Höpflinger for his extraordinary dedication and wish him many more wonderful years to enjoy his retirement!

NEW HEAD OF THE TAICANG PLANT Following an intensive five-month induction period, Konstantin Hinterplattner officially took over from Franz Höpflinger, who went into well-deserved retirement, in mid-May. Born in Upper Austria and raised in Haidershofen in Lower Austria, he completed an apprenticeship as a machining/CNC technician and then went on to earn his high school certificate. Hinterplattner gained his first professional experience as an application engineer at machine manufacturer WFL Millturn Technologies in Linz before travelling abroad for the first time in 2015: He spent a year in Nigeria as Workshop Manager at Thompson & Grace, a manufacturer of mechanical components for the oil and gas industry. In 2016, he moved to Engel in China, where he was Head of Production until the end of 2023. As General Manager of Starlinger Plastics Machinery Taicang, the passionate golfer is now responsible for the production of our RX loom series, which are not only sold on the Asian market, but are also supplied to customers in Africa, South America and Europe. “The team in Taicang can look back on many years of success, having built a solid foundation for the future under the leadership of Mr. Höpflinger,” says Hinterplattner. “My aim is to keep up this level of progress, and to maintain and further develop locally manufactured product groups in a cost-efficient and high-quality manner with new ideas.” We are delighted to support him in this endeavour and wish him every success!

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